Podcasts about Wyoming, United States

Much of the Wyoming listening on this page is the territory speaking from a century or more back: Elinore Pruitt Stewart's letters from a Burntfork ranch read aloud chapter by chapter, Owen Wister's stories of Wyoming Territory people, a scripted cavalry drama set at Fort Laramie. Beside that sit the cold cases: the state's wild-west murders, and one from Laramie in 1985. The present is carried by a public-affairs program on wolves, budgets and snow drought, a Wyoming Public Media series on what the West is becoming, and interviews with women across the state. Sports gets the least room.

What Wyoming is

Wyoming is the least populous US state, a high, dry rectangle where the Rockies meet the Great Plains. Yellowstone and Grand Teton fill its northwest corner; Cheyenne, the capital, is in the southeast, with Laramie and the University of Wyoming a short way west on Interstate 80. Ranching, coal, oil and gas, and park tourism carry the economy, and the state calls itself the Equality State for being first to give women the vote.

The territory in its own words

Letters of a Woman Homesteader is Stewart's account of homesteading in Wyoming as a widow. The chapter the feed plays is the story of Corabel: a rejected marriage license, a shooting near the twin buttes, and a dying man dictating his last wishes from a wagon halted so the jolting will not make death any harder. A later chapter lets a bishop's second wife say her children can neither inherit nor claim his name, and that she loves him anyway. Letters on an Elk Hunt, the sequel, has Daniel bringing his mother home after more than ten years in a poor farm.

Wister's Members of the Family is eight stories of Wyoming Territory people, and the clips favour its comic set pieces: a secretary of war laying it on thicker for a room of up-country recruits than he would in Boston, the recruits sitting before him "like rows of cantaloupes and watermelons" while Captain Stone's mustache rises like a hurricane signal, and Scipio Lemoine riding in from the hill to stop a lynching.

Fort Laramie, Norman Macdonnell's scripted military Western, follows Captain Lee Quince and his men through guard mount, new recruits, missing rifles and agency disputes. The clips run on rank and on jokes at a trooper's expense: a sergeant grants Trooper Harrison's wish for a change in the weather by sending him to the guardhouse, Mrs. Feimster makes the canteen a test case for "moral improvement", and Sergeant Gorse tells the captain there is "only room for one sergeant here".

The cold cases

Laramie's unsolved 1985 murder of Shelley Wiley gets the most deliberate treatment on this page. In The Coldest Case in Laramie, New York Times reporter Kim Barker re-investigates it through a 2016 arrest, in careful first-person narration that is quick to notice what does not add up. She finds Lieutenant Gary Poles, who ran the early investigation, at the old territorial prison, now a museum; he talks just long enough to tell her to go away, and other former officers will not discuss Fred at all. One line stands for the method: "There is no record of Fred having been a Navy SEAL." Fred Lamb himself describes a seven-and-a-half-hour interrogation ending with congratulations on solving the crime of the century.

Dead & Gone in Wyoming, from Scott Fuller, tells murders and mysteries from the state's wild-west history. In "Murder On The Plains" a sheepherder notices a dusk rider who looks like Slim Clifton heading for the Church homestead; two days later Clifton has moved in, and John and Luella Church are found buried side by side nearly three miles from home. "High, Lonesome Sound" turns on Don Kemp's Blazer found running on I-80, doors open, one set of footprints heading north; "The Girl Who Was Next" has Kelly Perringer saying she would let Donald Pack walk if he revealed where Kathleen was.

The state in the present tense

The news runs through Open Spaces, filed under News & Politics, a public-affairs program for Wyoming and the Mountain West whose titles show the range: "Cody Roberts sentenced in wolf case, ski resort monopolies, and more...", UW budget cuts, harm reduction in a vending machine, Indigenous communities and ICE. The clips go elsewhere: Al Simpson, at 93, saying his solace comes from the warmth of a relationship that has lasted 70 years, and recalling how he turned his mother's phrase "won't power" into "willpower"; Christine Peterson calling the federal changes around Greater Yellowstone warning signs rather than an obituary.

The Modern West, from Wyoming Public Media and PRX with host Melodie Edwards, is filed under Society & Culture. Samuel Western reads the Western constitutions for their pluralism and singles out Wyoming's doctrine that water goes with the land, "the Wyoming system", eventually exported to Australia. A shared episode from an off-gridding podcast has Eric and Johanna crediting DIY skills rather than solar panels for six years off the grid, and Johanna arguing that collapse means slow decentralization, not a single apocalyptic event.

First, But Last? interviews women across the state and is filed under History. Tara Nethercott, who became a state senator in 2016, says the constant theme when she asked her district what concerned them was "a preservation of our way of life". Lynnette Grey Bull, the first Native American woman from Wyoming to run for US Congress, recalls a CWC advisor telling her son to "just drop out and come back the next year". Jessica Bolerjack, a rodeo competitor, notes that breakaway roping has reached the PRCA ranks and the National Finals Rodeo.

WyoSports Podcast has David Graf and Robert Munoz on Wyoming high school sports, University of Wyoming athletics and the Mountain West; the episodes here date from late summer 2022, mostly Cowboys previews with broadcasters and reporters as guests, plus an Oil City-Cap City showdown. Jaden Adams says Northern Colorado's 105 penalty yards could decide whether Wyoming pulls away, and Greg Wrubell, voice of the Cougars, thinks Wyoming can repeat its Air Force formula against BYU's struggling ground game.

Where to start

• For the state's news: Open Spaces, with the Al Simpson interview or the wolf-case episode.
• For one case followed closely: The Coldest Case in Laramie, then Dead & Gone in Wyoming for the older murders.
• For the territory-era voice: Letters of a Woman Homesteader, then Members of the Family for Wister's fiction or Fort Laramie for the drama.
• For the Cowboys: WyoSports Podcast.

The Wyoming feed on this page plays clips from these shows.